{"id":39952,"date":"2015-02-12T03:10:29","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T03:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39952"},"modified":"2015-02-12T03:10:29","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T03:10:29","slug":"what-are-words-worth-hapa-hafu-or-mixed-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39952","title":{"rendered":"What Are Words Worth: Hapa, Hafu or Mixed-Race?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pacificcitizen.org\/what-are-words-worth-hapa-hafu-or-mixed-race\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>What Are Words Worth: Hapa, Hafu or Mixed-Race?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pacificcitizen.org\" target=\"_blank\">Pacific Citizen: The National Newspaper of the JACL<\/a><br \/>\nLos Angeles, California<br \/>\n2015-01-27<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/gillers.com\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Gil Asakawa<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve just finished writing revisions for a new edition of my book, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=39938\" target=\"_blank\">Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa \u2026 &amp; Their Friends<\/a>,\u201d which will be published this July by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stonebridge.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Stone Bridge Press<\/a>. I mention this not just to pimp the book to you all, but because I wrote in the new foreword how I have decided not to use the word \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=329\" target=\"_blank\">hapa<\/a>,\u201d at least for now.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, I wrote that I\u2019ll use \u201cmixed race\u201d instead.<\/p>\n<p>Hapa is a word originally used in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hawaii\" target=\"_blank\">Hawaii<\/a> to describe mixed-race people, like half-Asian, half-Hawaiian. The term was used as a slur, but over the years, it\u2019s become commonly used even by mixed-race people. In fact, I\u2019ve heard mixed-race people other than Asian combinations refer to themselves as hapa.<\/p>\n<p>But in 2008, when I moderated a panel in Denver titled \u201cThe Bonds of Community: Hapa Identity in a Changing U.S.\u201d for a conference sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.janm.org\" target=\"_blank\">Japanese American National Museum<\/a>, a man stood up during the question-and-answer period and said he thought it was a racist term. At the time, I pushed back gently and noted that it\u2019s already a pretty common term.<\/p>\n<p>The interchange with this man has stayed with me ever since&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pacificcitizen.org\/what-are-words-worth-hapa-hafu-or-mixed-race\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Are Words Worth: Hapa, Hafu or Mixed-Race? Pacific Citizen: The National Newspaper of the JACL Los Angeles, California 2015-01-27 Gil Asakawa I\u2019ve just finished writing revisions for a new edition of my book, \u201cBeing Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa \u2026 &amp; Their Friends,\u201d which will be published this July by Stone [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,125,8,20],"tags":[19325,18557,19335],"class_list":["post-39952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-gil-asakawa","tag-pacific-citizen","tag-pacific-citizen-the-national-newspaper-of-the-jacl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}